October 2016

Monday, October 10, 2016

I watched the debate last night and, particularly at the beginning, was ashamed. Ashamed to be an American, ashamed for the Republican party, ashamed for my country which is now faced with choosing between a pig and a pig's wife for President. God help us, for many reasons.

Someone whose opinions I once respected, whose opinions I've shared on these pages, who considers himself a conservative and, because of my #NeverTrump status, considers me anything but, was moved to suggest that my opposition to his political savior, particularly in light of my expressed disgust in the audio tapes released days ago, made me a bonafide member of the Party of Caiaphas, his accompanying explanation relaying that Christ fought against the power structures of His day and that I, because I opposed Trump, opposed that same fight today.

Think on that... my opposition to Trump was, in the eyes of this supporter, opposition to Christ-likeness and put me on par with the high priest and his merry band of Christ-killers. Yup. And he meant it but... didn't stop there.

My strong disgust with Trump's view of women, and oh by the way, Bill Clinton's view of women, makes me a sexist because... are you ready for this... expressing the notion that all men should treat all women with dignity "commands us to think of all women as the same" and "the truth is, you can't get more sexist than that."

Now think on that... my belief in the words expressed by St. John Paul II in the graphic above make me and by extension, every faithful Catholic and many others, sexists.

I've come to a conclusion, one I've held for some time now, that Donald Trump isn't the problem. The man's rise to stardom within the Republican Party, his support among particularly Evangelicals and especially far too many Catholics, is symptomatic of something far deeper, far more troubling, far more sinister.

For 80 years, the Deseret News has not entered into the troubled waters of presidential endorsement. We are neutral on matters of partisan politics. We do, however, feel a duty to speak clearly on issues that affect the well-being and morals of the nation.

Accordingly, today we call on Donald Trump to step down from his pursuit of the American presidency.

In democratic elections, ideas have consequences, leadership matters and character counts.

The idea that women secretly welcome the unbridled and aggressive sexual advances of powerful men has led to the mistreatment, sorrow and subjugation of countless women for far too much of human history.

The belief that the party and the platform matter more than the character of the candidate ignores the wisdom of the ages that, “when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” (Proverbs 29:2)

We understand that politicians and presidential candidates are human and that everyone makes mistakes. We do not believe that what is expressed in an unguarded moment of conversation should be the full measure of an individual. And we unquestionably support the principle that people deserve forgiveness, compassion and a second chance.

But history affirms that leaders' examples either elevate or demean the lives of those being led. When choosing the ostensible leader of the free world, the American electorate requires the clear assurance that their chosen candidate will consistently put the well-being of others ahead of his or her own personal gratification. The most recent revelations of Trump’s lewdness disturb us not only because of his vulgar objectification of women, but also because they poignantly confirm Trump’s inability to self-govern.

What oozes from this audio is evil. We hear a married man give smooth, smug and self-congratulatory permission to his intense impulses, allowing them to outweigh the most modest sense of decency, fidelity and commitment. And although it speaks volumes about sexual morality, it goes to the heart of all ethical behavior. Trump’s banter belies a willingness to use and discard other human beings at will. That characteristic is the essence of a despot.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

On the right, if you scratch the surface of the internet, you’ll encounter staunch xenophobia. Foreign Criminals = All Foreigners Must Go. I’m seeing a resurgence of nativist arguments among Americans like something out of 1850.

On the left, there’s worried hand-wringing and fretful apologies for those poor foreign people who just haven’t been taught their manners yet, and terrible fear that if we acknowledge any cultural aspects of this particular set of crimes then we are bad, bad people.

To make an analogy, it would be like addressing the US illegal drug trade by either banning tacos or else pretending there are no cartels south of the border.

This is not the way.

Christianity: Always Simple, Never Easy

What is the moral response to the dueling problems of strangers in need of refuge and rank wickedness? It isn’t complicated. But it does require a willingness to accept the entirety of the Gospel.

Here are the principles:

We are obliged, as much as we are we able, to welcome the foreigner. That’s what the Bible says.

Crime is crime. It doesn’t matter who is doing the raping, serious crimes have be dealt with frankly and unequivocally.

This creates some tension for public policy. If a nation is in fact unable to receive immigrants due to an inability to maintain civil order, that is a legitimate reason to set limits on the borders. Doing so, however, doesn’t allow us to wash our hands of our obligation to welcome the stranger. Rather, public policy should be oriented towards strengthening the institutions and general tenor of the nation so that in the future it is possible to provide more assistance to our neighbors in need.

Terror attacks around the country in recent months have raised questions about national security. In response, some elected officials have called for dramatic changes to United States refugee policy. To be sure, there are legitimate security concerns in the United States, but when it comes how the debate about refugee policy is being framed, there’s an important element often missing.

In November 2015, 130 people were murdered in Paris by terrorists who were French and Belgian citizens. None of them were refugees or otherwise displaced Syrians. Yet, within a week of the attack the U.S. House of Representatives voted to effectively shut down the refugee program, citing fears that the refugee program would be infiltrated by terrorists. Congress has not attempted to restrict French or Belgian access to the United States.

In December 2015, a natural born U.S. citizen and his Pakistani wife killed 14 in San Bernardino. The wife had entered the U.S. on a fiancé visa. In 2015 the U.S. issued 35,559 fiancé visas and 74,150 visas to Pakistanis. To date, neither the president nor Congress have taken any action on either fiancé visas or Pakistani visas.

Instead of “pausing” or reforming visa categories that actually correlate to the cited terror attacks, several elected officials have decided to use those attacks to stoke fears about Syrian refugees. Of all the legal pathways to enter the United States, the Refugee Admissions Program features the most rigorous screening. It is correct to say the program can’t guarantee perfection (no program can), yet even those who wish to shut down the program don’t deny its security relative to non-immigrant visa entries.

If politicians claim to act on behalf of our security, and if the refugee program is the most rigorous of all U.S. visa screening, then shouldn’t they also scrutinize all the less secure ways people enter our country from around the globe? If security is all the rage this election season, why hasn’t any representative held a hearing or introduced legislation for increasing security on any of the nonimmigrant visa categories, all of which require less screening than refugees?

For example, no politician has called for “pausing” or otherwise reforming business and tourism visas. Neither the B-1 or the B-2 visas require screening at a level comparable to the refugee visas. If the refugee program is so vulnerable, then the threat we face from the relatively insecure B-1 and B-2 visas must be staggering.

Indeed, the 9/11 terrorists arrived on U.S. soil using business and tourist visas (one was a student visa). The Boston Marathon bombers arrived as minors with their parents who obtained tourist visas. Nevertheless, in fiscal year 2015 alone, the U.S. government issued over 7 million B1/B2 visas. And yet, ten months after Paris and nine months after San Bernardino, we have not seen any hearing or legislation intended to pause or otherwise modify pathways into the U.S. that would have made any difference in the terror attacks cited by those stoking fears about refugees. Visa categories for business, tourism, fiancés, and Pakistanis remain unquestioned.

Shutting down legal pathways of entry out of fear isn’t exactly the response of a confident, free nation. It’s also unlikely the federal government will meaningfully curb any pathway that would hamper industry and tourism. But political conservatives, particularly Christians among us, claim to be truth tellers. Congress reacted to Paris and San Bernardino, yes. But have they actually put forth a policy directed at the threat they identify in those attacks? The answer is no, but they claim yes. While claiming to act for the sake of our security, Congress has given attention only to what is already the most secure while ignoring what is least secure. This reveals either incompetence or dishonesty.

National security is a valid priority for the state and citizens can disagree in good faith on the particulars. Southern Baptists have passed numerous resolutions affirming both the responsibility of sovereign nation to protect its people and encouraging ministry to refugees. At the same time our statement of faith calls for us to influence government with the principles of “righteousness, truth, and brotherly love” and to “be ready to work with all men of good will in any good cause.”

Americans might disagree on specific policies, politicians have an obligation to correlate their solutions with the problems they identify. And scapegoating vulnerable people with political smoke screens and buzzwords is not the way forward.

As part of a new survey connected to our broader Religious Landscape Study, we asked these people to explain, in their own words,why they no longer identify with a religious group. This resulted in hundreds of different responses (after all, everyone’s religious experience is a bit different), but many of them shared one of a few common themes.

About half of current religious “nones” who were raised in a religion (49%) indicate that a lack of belief led them to move away from religion. This includes many respondents who mention “science” as the reason they do not believe in religious teachings, including one who said “I’m a scientist now, and I don’t believe in miracles.” Others reference “common sense,” “logic” or a “lack of evidence” – or simply say they do not believe in God.

But there are other reasons people give for leaving behind their childhood religion.

Read the entire piece to find those reasons.

Sad stuff. And I can't help but wonder if this growing trend correlates in any way with society's seemingly increasing dysfunction.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

I was raised Catholic if being raised Catholic means that I was baptized as an infant and as an 8 year old, I received my first communion. I distinctly remember as a child going to Mass with Mom. I can remember darkened churches, high ceilings, the smells of incense, ladies in veils, reverence, holiness and awe.

Sadly, what I cannot recall is being taught much about the Eucharist, about the Saints, about Mother Mary or the Church Fathers, about the richness and depth of the faith, about God's mercy abounding through the Sacraments. All that which delineates Catholicism from the rest of Christianity.

As a result, I wandered, for a period of roughly 40 years, from the Church I now embrace fully, a wandering I've come to regret for the time lost in learning and then living the faith.

In a piece that touches initially on Mike Pence's Catholic upbringing and his own subsequent wandering, Sherry Weddell delves deeper into what has become a rite of passage for too many Catholics:

Mike Pence has a lot of company in the evangelical world. The Pew 2014 U.S. “Religious Landscape Survey” found that 13% of adults raised Catholic now consider themselves to be evangelicals (roughly 6 million people). And leaving the Church as an undergrad is all too normal. White college-age Millennials (ages 18-24) are 17 times more likely to leave the Catholic Church than to enter it. Young Catholic Millennials are also 10 times more likely to leave the faith of their childhood than a college-age white evangelical, according to the 2012 “Millennial Values Survey” sponsored by the Public Religion Research Institute.

But where Catholics proactively evangelize, there is real hope. A fascinating new finding is that 6% of American adults are cradle Catholics who now call themselves Protestants or “nones,” while still feeling at least partially Catholic. Pew has a term for adults who don’t think of themselves as Catholic in terms of religious practice but who do think of themselves as “partially Catholic” for other reasons: “cultural Catholics.”

While most committed cradle Catholics don’t have a mental category for “Bapticatholic” or “half-Catholic none,” many 21st-century spiritual wanderers do. It is no accident that Mike Pence called himself an “evangelical Catholic” for years.

What is both astonishing and hopeful is that 43%, or just over 6 million, of these cradle Catholics-turned “cultural Catholics” told Pew surveyors that they were open to the possibility of returning to the faith. They either feel connected to Catholic culture or to the Church through family, or they identify with certain Catholic beliefs or practices. As evangelizers, it is essential that we remember that those who do leave often retain significant emotional, spiritual and/or cultural connections or bridges to Catholicism over which they could return with our help.

Another reason that Mike Pence’s story causes many Catholics to feel consternation has to do with the most startling finding of the 2007 U.S. “Religious Landscape Survey.” It is this: Only 60% of Catholic adults believed in a personal God, and less than half were not certain that they could have a personal relationship with God. The survey also found that 78% of Catholics who eventually left for the evangelical-Protestant world said that their spiritual needs weren’t being met. According to the survey, teens who had been raised Catholic and later become Protestant as adults experienced a huge 49% growth in the “very strong” faith category. In fact, Catholic adults-turned-Protestant measured 25% higher in “very strong” faith than those raised Catholic who had retained their Catholic identity. Catholics who become Protestant also report 21% higher church attendance. It is a terrible irony that the best guarantee of regular adult church attendance at the moment among Americans raised Catholic is to become Protestant.

I have no problem at all believing that the idea of a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” had not been part of Mike Pence’s spiritual experience before he went away to college. That’s because the language of “personal relationship” with God sounds either odd or suspiciously Protestant to many Catholics. Since my book Forming Intentional Disciples was published four years ago, I have had many conversations with Catholic leaders — bishops, seminary faculty, priests, religious and lay leaders — who told me that they were not yet disciples when they began their ministry. A disciple is someone who is intentionally seeking to follow Jesus Christ as Lord in the midst of his Church. One man, who was in full-time ministry forming clergy, told me, “Until I read your book last month, I didn’t know it was possible to have a personal relationship with God.” When I recovered from my shock, I responded, “Help me understand why you think this came about.” He said that his parents were very faithful, practicing Catholics. “We never talked about [our] relationship with God,” he told me. “I just didn’t know.”

The wonderfully hopeful news is that I have seen an extraordinary change over the past four years. Catholic leaders at all levels are beginning to seriously deal with our failure to make disciples of our own, as the last four popes have asked us to do. Pastors and leadership in hundreds of American parishes and whole dioceses are deliberately breaking the cultural silence about having a personal relationship with Christ and banding together to make intentional disciples of the already baptized in parishes, campus ministries, families and schools. Increasingly, we get it.

In the 21st-century West, God has no grandchildren. Faith is not simply inherited, but personally chosen. Therefore, cultural Catholicism by itself is dead as a retention strategy. If we forget and fall back into maintenance mode, we now have Mike Pence as a living reminder that if we don’t make disciples of our own, someone else will do it for us.

We are pressured today, from every corner it seems, to keep our faith to ourselves, to not allow it to enter the public sphere. We are pressured externally certainly but also internally by the knowledge that as sinners, we make terrible witnesses. It becomes far too easy to be branded hypocrites or worse, to be charged with being judgmental, for merely speaking Catholic/Christian truth and so many of us decide being public about the faith isn't worth the price or we buy into the lie that keeping our faith to ourselves is what's best.

Sherry tells us things are changing and I pray she is correct... as I pray that I will change to bring about that wider change to which she speaks.

"The function of the two-party system in our republic---where numerous unique interests compete, yet strive to coexist in peace---is to muster consensus along the broadest possible lines. Those lines in the United States are Left and Right: destruction or conservation, secularism or faith, death or life, dependency or responsibility, pessimism or optimism, relativism or objective truth, anarchy or the rule of law, state control or personal freedom.

Sure, you can form your own political party with the 5 other guys in the world who think precisely as you do, but your effect on the culture is bound to be nil, or close to it; to affect society, you must team up with people of dissimilar interests, and a two-party system is the most efficient way of doing this.

Christians like Sensing don't seem to realize that the Perfect is not just an enemy of the Good, but its deadliest enemy, and that petulantly withholding their votes until Perfection or Apocalypse comes not only hurts their fellow Christians, but also hurts every other innocent person in the world who relies upon the prevalence of Christian ideals to make their lives bearable. Think, for a moment, of the tens of thousands of Yazidis, secular Iranians, Iraqis and Syrians, and Middle Eastern Christians who would still be alive today if the Left had not prevailed in our last presidential election. They prevailed because Christians like Sensing refused to participate over some self-righteous and, frankly, selfish reservation about a candidate.

In this instance, Donald Trump, however absurd it may seem to us, is currently bearing the standard for American Christians. Voting for him is voting against all the injustice and misery that will be caused if the Left prevails---all the evil, all the chaos, all the innocent blood that is bound to be shed.

I would remind Reverend Sensing and other Christians---who really ought to know better---that the Jews of Christ's time had such a fixation on the Messiah appearing in the form of a strong military commander that when he ultimately appeared in the form of a carpenter, they were unable to recognize him. Some---hell, all---of the greatest figures in the Bible are deeply flawed: murderers, adulterers, liars, etc.

For:

"...my power is made perfect in weakness..."

and

"...the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom..."

Withholding your vote is not a sign of virtue; in fact, it may be the exact opposite. Selfish pride is the worst of all sins.

Voting for the side that best represents Christian interests, however imperfectly, allows the Christian point of view to stay in the game. Abandon the field, and we lose all possibility of influence on the greater society.

I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian who is sick to death at the cowardice and sanctimony of American Christians and their self-absorbed rationalizations for not participating in the current political battles shaping our society. Because they insist on operating at such an 'exalted' ethical level, America now has atheists, statists and terrorists running the show.

Saturday, July 23, 2016

If there were a morally acceptable candidate offered by either major party, of course you could vote for that person in clear conscience. There isn’t, and therefore many people are settling for choosing the least-bad candidate.

Don’t do this.

Vote third party.

Why?

Voting third party is the most effective way for you to bring about a change of regime.

It’s more effective than a write-in campaign (barring a massive, united, nationwide campaign, which I don’t see happening). It’s certainly more effective than abstaining — no one will notice you’re missing, and other than a few kind souls at the League of Women Voters, no one will much care that you couldn’t be bothered to show up.

When you vote third party, you send a clear, unequivocal message that is formally recorded and measured. You indicate to the major parties, and to the rest of the citizenry, which way the reform needs to go in order to field a winning candidate.

Voting third party will not cause the person you cast your vote for to win. It will, however, cause the next round of candidates, at every level of elected office, to seek to be more like what it would take to win your vote.

Candidates need your vote. They watch the polls and try to read the wind and guess which way to shift in order to ride popular opinion.

By voting third party, you most clearly communicate what your expectations are and how the next cycle’s candidates need to be different. Among other benefits, voting third party informs the major parties what kinds of candidates they should support at the local and state level — which candidates feed the system for the years ahead.

If you care about the future, don’t settle for the sick feeling that comes from knowing that you helped fuel the victory of some person whose policies you abhor. Vote like you mean for your republic to still be a functioning democracy ten, twenty, even two-hundred years from now.

I've been thinking more and more about what I plan to do in November. Earlier, I was seriously considering writing somebody, anybody, in for President as I know with certainty that I cannot in good conscience vote for Trump, whose moral failings, his lack of foreign policy knowledge and his constitutional ignorance rule him out. Nor could I vote for for Hillary who I see to be the most corrupt politician in modern history and whose party has made a complete mess of things whenever and wherever they've been in power.

Roughly a week ago, I started seriously thinking about The Constitution Party as a plausible alternative though as of this writing, they're not yet on the ballot here in my home state.

What say those of you out there who won't be voting for either Hillary or Trump? What will you folks be doing?

We are faced with choices today. At a time when all the short-term incentives point toward unreason, our leaders, political and cultural, must choose reason. At a time when group solidarity is trumping individual accountability, we must choose individual accountability. At a time when the loudest voices don’t wait for evidence to make sweeping judgments, we must wait for the evidence.

...

When we tribalize conflict, we create a tribalized society. It’s that simple. Stop lying and distorting facts for your own short-term political gain. It has been extraordinary to watch so many on the left and the right disregard the truth for the sake of “larger purposes.” A known lie such as “hands-up, don’t shoot” became the slogan of an entire movement. Scaremongers refused to deal with actual statistics and instead perpetuated the claim that police officers had declared “open season” on black men. Comprehensive reporting shows that police overwhelmingly use force when they are “under attack or defending someone who [is].” Despite the millions of interactions between police and citizens (including black citizens), the number of controversial or contentious shootings is low. It’s so low that in a nation of more than 300 million citizens, we can rattle off individual names – Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner – rather than consider the horror of mass death, of a true “open season.”

At the same time, it’s just as dishonest to pretend that police abuse is a fiction or that official racism has been vanquished. It is a simple fact that some police departments have covered up police misconduct (McDonald’s case comes immediately to mind) or, typically at the behest of their political masters, systematically abused the citizens they’re sworn to protect, turning them into ATMs for the state through excessive and burdensome fines and citations. While the Department of Justice’s investigation of the police shooting of Michael Brown exonerated officer Darren Wilson, for example, it painted an extraordinarily disturbing portrait of the use and abuse of official power in Ferguson, Missouri. Police made Ferguson a hell for its residents, a place where, as I wrote at the time, “a small class of the local power brokers creat[ed] two sets of rules, one for the connected and another for the mass of people who are forced – often at gunpoint – to pay for the ‘privilege’ of being governed.” No American man, woman, or child should have to live under such a regime. But the problem will never be solved if we refuse to acknowledge its complexities. No debate that so reflexively distorts reality will ever be productive.

...

Condemning the evil men and women who affiliate themselves with Black Lives Matter – people who tweet out applause for cop-killings – should not stop us from acknowledging that movement’s many more protesters who abhor violence and weep sincerely for the police lives lost last night. Condemning those cops who are bigoted should not stop us from acknowledging the many more cops who willingly lay down their lives for all citizens every single day. People of good faith can and should disagree about how best to prevent more lives from being lost in the future. But nothing will get better until everyone first recognizes that those with whom they disagree are people of good faith.

I've seen some of this tribalization in my own social media newsfeed today. People pouring gasoline on the flames. It's sickening, depressing, disgusting. And though I agree completely with Mr. French, I go a step further.

What ails this once great country will take divine healing. There's no way to get around this. It's factual. It's obvious. It's real.

We should all cry out for that healing, and there's no better way in my view for that to take place than to petition those who've been recognized by the Church as dispensers of that healing.

In her column this week, Peggy Noonan has written about an apparent dearth of genius, an inability for anyone in power to bring any sort of creative, constructive thinking to bear on the myriad problems and true evils that are before us, threatening every nation, and every people. She says we are missing the “genius cluster” that has always arisen — “Providentially,” her friend suggests — when the world has needed it to.

Where are the geniuses who will figure out how to fight a hidden yet determined international band of beasts who are committed to death — and all too willing to “be jihad in-place” — bringing the ISIS principles to local places of business and coming to a playground near you?

What we are seeing in ISIS is what we have seen before in the death-serving ideologies of the 20th centuries; totalitarian extremism never loses its desire to destroy all that does not conform. The illness is always the same. What has changed, though, is the antibody with which the West has previously addressed this killer virus. Like the culture itself, the antibody has shifted; it no longer contains one essential component necessary to fight the evil that instigates human savagery on this level, that of a faith.

There are no “genius clusters” arising to deal with ISIS, because there are no geniuses in leadership willing to look into the medicine bag and say “we have run out of faith in anything beyond our own selves, our court systems and bureaucracies…”

Consider that when the Nazis were barreling through Europe, the majority of the western world professed – with no fear of ridicule or of giving insult, anywhere – a belief in something greater than itself. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were conventionally religious men of their times, not overly observant. But they were imbued with enough faith to recognize that some occasions called for more than rhetoric; some things called for enough humility to make a prayer of supplication, one calling on the Deity to guide, to bless, to sustain – to, as Lincoln said, have “firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.”

Our post-Christian, post-faith Western leadership is no longer capable of making public prayer, or willing to credit heaven with anything but twinkling stars. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was told by his own government “we don’t do God” and President Obama, who once defined the notion of “sin” as being “out of alignment with my values” has not yet, in nearly 8 years, attempted to lead a nation in prayer.

This matters in the face of ISIS, especially in its revelation that its attempts to acquire power through fear are indiscriminate: they are murdering of all peoples, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or agnostic.

If this is true, one might ask, then why especially should the West reacquaint itself with the language of faith and supernaturalism?

The answer is simple: because what ISIS is doing is a true evil.

The entire piece should be read, inwardly digested and passed on, particularly today when this great country celebrates freedom, a freedom absent the tethering and mooring of the guiding hand of God that will not last long.

Think on these things but more than that, pray... pray as Ms. Scalia has asked, for a "genius cluster" to rise, one that will not overlook the helping Hand of Heaven.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

This former Marco Rubio faith advisor is likely catching a tremendous amount of grief and ill-will for his courageous act:

Eric Teetsel had intended to stand outside Donald Trump’s meeting with evangelical leaders Tuesday and talk with attendees he knew about why he thought the gathering was a bad idea.

But when Teetsel, a 32-year-old evangelical political activist who was Sen. Marco Rubio’s faith adviser during the Florida Republican’s presidential campaign, arrived at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, he felt compelled to do something more to speak out against Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

He walked to a Walgreens, looking for poster board, so he could create a handmade sign on the spot and hold it outside the meeting. But Walgreens didn’t have any.

“I wondered if that was a sign from God that I shouldn’t do this,” Teetsel told me, sitting at a table on the ninth floor of the cavernous hotel. “Then I walked to Staples and found some poster board.”

He used a red marker in his bag to write out a message for attendees, spectators and reporters gathered: “Torture is not pro-life. Racism is not pro-life. Misogyny is not pro-life. Murdering the children of terrorists is not pro-life.”

Teetsel included a Scripture verse, Proverbs 29:2, at the bottom, which says, “When the righteous thrive, the people rejoice; when the wicked rule, the people groan.”

He stood outside on Broadway, a former presidential campaign adviser holding a handwritten sign denouncing his own party’s presidential nominee amid the spectacle of Times Square.

Teetsel is not an impartial observer, politically speaking. He traveled to New York this week from his home in Kansas to participate in meetings with leaders of Better for America, a group organizing a campaign-in-waiting for an independent candidate who could give voters an alternative to both Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

But Teetsel did feel compelled to do more than just maintain a low-key presence in the lobby outside the meeting between Trump and several hundred evangelical leaders.

“Christians are called to live out the Gospel in every aspect of their lives, including politics. It matters. It’s important. But we have to be sure that we are representing the Gospel in truth,” he said. “I think we know enough about Donald Trump to know that a Christian response should be prayer for him, but also a prophetic witness about what is true.”

May the good Lord give Teetsel the perseverance and stick-to-it-iveness he's clearly going to need as he faces the fallout and wrath of the glassy-eyed Trumpetists.

Monday, June 20, 2016

In one of the most cogent and analytical responses to the Orlando terrorist attack, Stephen Turley provides insights to what, if not corrected, will be the deathknell of western culture:

Why does our society find it so difficult to blame radical jihadists for the murders they commit?

I think the key to understanding this incoherence can be found in what scholars call a “risk society,” which refers to the unique ways in which modern people deal with hazards and insecurities as they relate to the future. There are two reasons for why we moderns are unique in the way we handle potential threats and hazards:

First, we are more reliant on scientific and technological processes in our day-to-day living than any previous society. Science and technology have penetrated into virtually every aspect of our lives, from the moment we wake up to a digital alarm and turn on our lights, to making our cup of coffee and microwaving our breakfasts, to driving to work to sitting at a computer sending out emails and texts on our smart phones.

However, secondly, this technological age comes at a cost: technology-based societies tend to reject traditional moral conceptions of life. This is because technology is organized and governed by modern scientific processes which are considered value neutral and thus devoid of moral frames of reference. So, in many respects, we are living in what we might call a “post-traditional” or “post-moral age.” Indeed, this is why we have LGBT values, which are not found in traditional moral societies, in the first place.

And so, these scientific and technological processes have opened up to us a whole new future of unprecedented possibilities and potentialities, but without the aid of traditional morality to guide us into this brave new world.

So now that we are in this post-moral, post-traditional society, the question is: Whom do we blame when massacres like Orlando occur? Post-moral societies basically have two options: They can blame material and environmental factors or they can blame the previous moral tradition that once dominated society but is now reinterpreted as inherently oppressive.